Texas Saw 615 Deaths In Custody Statewide In 2014; More Than 400 At TDCJ

Because the MSM covers the death penalty so closely, one frequently sees headlines like this one - "Texas inmate set to die Wednesday gets reprieve" - whenever scheduled executions are delayed. But we seldom see comparable coverage regarding TDCJ inmates' unscheduled deaths, which occur on average more than once per day.

Texas' final death-in-custody total for 2014 reached a whopping 615 people by year's end, according to the master list (xls) maintained by the Texas Attorney General, including 410 people who died in custody of TDCJ and 205 people who in custody of local jails or officers in the field. By comparison, the state executed ten people in 2014.

In December, TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark sent Grits data regarding deaths in custody at TDCJ in recent years. Adding last year's total, here's the updated list for context:

That's an average of 430 prisoner deaths per year at TDCJ over the last eight years, with last year on the low end of the range. These deaths were never scheduled, thus never delayed, and for the most part no newspaper reporter ever told their stories. But they remain just as dead as the men and women killed in the execution chamber, their families grieve as ardently. Dead is dead, even if humans seem to suffer from a desire to make some deaths matter more than others. It's all the same to the deceased.

Once new rules are in place, Texas inmates will again be allowed to marry while they're incarcerated, but this time they'll do so in person, not via proxy as in the past. The report from AP (Nov. 18) on the topic began:
Texas plans to allow marriage ceremonies inside prisons between an inmate and an intended spouse who isn't incarcerated, officials disclosed Tuesday.

Inmates in Texas historically have been allowed to marry by proxy, meaning someone stood in for the prisoner at a ceremony held somewhere other than the penitentiary. But a state law that took effect a year ago and requires both parties be present for a marriage ceremony has had the unintended consequence of halting proxy marriages in Texas prisons. At the same time, U.S. Supreme Court rulings have upheld prisoners' right to marry.

State prison officials said they're framing the new rules now.

"Given the restrictions and understanding offenders have a legal right to marry, the agency is drafting a policy that allows an inmate to marry a non-incarcerated person within our facilities," agency spokesman Jason Clark said.

The story included a few details about how the new system would work:
According to the plans, the marriages would have to comply with prison visitation rules, be consistent with the prisoner's visitation status and require no special amenities.

For example, a death row inmate is not allowed any outside contact. While the inmate could get married under the new policy, the prisoner still would be separated by glass and be allowed no contact with a spouse.

Rules already on the books don't allow conjugal visits.

The spouse would have to obtain the marriage license, make arrangements for someone to conduct the nuptials and be responsible for any payment to that person. Prison chaplains would not be involved, Clark said. Attendance would be limited to the offender, the spouse and the person conducting the ceremony.

"Some of the other details are still being worked out at this point," he said.

With the ultimate captive markets, prison bankers and state jailers make money off high fees for financial services.

Pat Taylor doesn’t believe in going into debt. She keeps her bills in a freezer bag under her bed, next to old photo albums, and believes in paying them on time religiously. For Taylor, living within your means is part of being a good Christian.

Lately, Taylor, 64, has felt torn between that commitment and her desire to be a loving, supportive mother for her son Eddie.

Eddie, 38, is serving 20-year prison sentence at Bland Correctional Center for armed robbery. He’s doing his time at a medium-security Virginia state prison located 137 miles northwest of Johnson City, across the dips and valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains here in the heart of Appalachia. The cost of supporting and visiting Eddie keeps going up, so Pat makes trade-offs.

“I would send him money even if it broke me, because I do go without paying some bills sometimes to go see him,” Pat says.

Between gas to make the trip and overpriced sandwiches from the prison vending machine, visiting Bland costs about $50, a strain on her housekeeper’s wages. So she alternates, visiting Eddie one week and sending him money the next.

To get cash to her son, Pat used to purchase a money order at the post office for $1.25 and mail it to the prison, for a total cost of less than $2. But in March of last year, the Virginia Department of Corrections informed her that JPay Inc., a private company in Florida, would begin handling all deposits into inmates’ accounts.

Sending a money order through JPay takes too long, so Taylor started using her debit card to get him funds instead. To send Eddie $50, Taylor must pay $6.95 to JPay. Depending on how much she can afford to send, the fee can be as high as 35 percent. In other states, JPay’s fees approach 45 percent.

After the fee, the state takes out another 15 percent of her money for court fees and a mandatory savings account, which Eddie will receive upon his release in 2021, minus the interest, which goes to the Department of Corrections.

Eddie needs money to pay for basic needs like toothpaste, visits to the doctor and winter clothes. In some states families of inmates pay for toilet paper, electricity, even room and board, as governments increasingly shift the costs of imprisonment from taxpayers to the families of inmates.

“To give him $50, I have to send $70 off my card,” says Taylor, who moved to a smaller apartment on the outskirts of Johnson City in part because of the rising cost of supporting Eddie.

“They’re punishing the families, not the inmates.”

Price Of Prison

JPay and other prison bankers collect tens of millions of dollars every year from inmates’ families in fees for basic financial services. To make payments, some forego medical care, skip utility bills and limit contact with their imprisoned relatives, the Center for Public Integrity found in a six-month investigation.

Inmates earn as little as 12 cents per hour in many places, wages that have not increased for decades. The prices they pay for goods to meet their basic needs continue to increase.

By erecting a virtual tollbooth at the prison gate, JPay has become a critical financial conduit for an opaque constellation of vendors that profit from millions of poor families with incarcerated loved ones.

JPay streamlines the flow of cash into prisons, making it easier for corrections agencies to take a cut. Prisons do so directly, by deducting fees and charges before the money hits an inmate’s account. They also allow phone and commissary vendors to charge marked-up prices, then collect a share of the profits generated by these contractors.

Taken together, the costs imposed by JPay, phone companies, prison store operators and corrections agencies make it far more difficult for poor families to escape poverty so long as they have a loved one in the system.

Shifting Costs To Families

“It’s not just the money transfer that’s the problem, it’s the system it enables to shift costs onto families,” says Lee Petro, an attorney who helped litigate for a national cap on some prison phone rates. Without companies like JPay, he says, “it would be much harder to take money from families and make families of inmates pay their own keep.”

In 12 years, JPay says it has grown to provide money transfers to more than 1.7 million offenders in 32 states, or nearly 70 percent of the inmates in U.S. prisons.

For the families of nearly 40 percent of those prisoners, JPay is the only way to send money to a loved one. Others can choose between JPay and a handful of smaller companies, most of them created by phone and commissary vendors to compete with the industry leader. Western Union also serves some prisons.

JPay handled nearly 7 million transactions in 2013, generating well over $50 million in revenue. It expects to transfer more than $1 billion this year. (The company declined to provide any financial details; those included in this article are culled from public records and interviews with current and former employees.)

“We invented this business,” said Ryan Shapiro, 37, the company’s founder and CEO, in a phone interview in June. “Everyone else tries to imitate what we did, and they don’t do it as well.”

Shapiro says working with corrections includes extra costs for security and software integration. He says he charges only as much as he must to maintain a razor-thin profit margin.

But others provide similar services for less.

NIC Inc., a competitor that helps states set up their websites, charges a flat fee of $2.40 in Maine to send money to inmates. Until recently, Arkansas charged 5 percent to send money through the state’s own Web portal.

Floridians pay a fee of 3.5 percent to handle traffic tickets online.

Despite its kudzu-like growth, JPay so far has avoided scrutiny by consumer regulators.

In response to questions for this story, however, the New York Department of Financial Services’ consumer division is reviewing the company’s practices, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not allowed to discuss active investigations.

JPay’s rapid rise stems in part from the generous deal it offers many prison systems. They pay nothing to have JPay take over handling financial transfers. And for every payment it accepts in these states — prisoners typically receive about one per month — the company sends between 50 cents and $2.50 back to the prison operator. These profit-sharing arrangements, which vendors offer as deal-sweeteners in contract negotiations, are known in the industry as “commissions.”

JPay’s payments to Illinois last year came to about $4,000 a month, according to documents obtained under the state’s open records law.

Jails often deduct intake fees, medical co-pays or the cost of basic toiletries first, leaving the account with a negative balance. This prevents inmates from buying “optional” supplies like stationery or sturdier shoes until they have paid down the debt.

Such charges levied by jails for common items are not new. The practice began prior to the rise of JPay, mainly with phone companies and operators of prison stores. But by automating the process, prison bankers make it a lot easier.

$100 Underwear

Negative account balances discourage cash-strapped people from helping relatives, says Linda Dolan, 58, a manager for a defense contractor in California. Last year, when her son was sentenced to 20 days in jail in St. Lucie County, Florida, for reckless driving, Linda wanted to buy him a second pair of underwear and socks. But the county’s intake fee and daily “rent” already had put the account about $70 in the red. Linda and her husband both were out of work and couldn’t afford to pay $100 for a pair of underwear.

“If relatives are putting money on somebody’s books while they’re an inmate, it’s to help them buy necessities,” Linda says. “I didn’t think it was right that the county was stealing the money.”

Capt. William Lawhorn of the St. Lucie County sheriff’s office said that inmates are charged a $25 initial booking fee, $3 a day for “subsistence” and medical co-pays, all of which can result in a negative balance. He said nobody is denied any type of needed service or care, and when inmates do have money, it’s used for candy and other junk food. Inmates in the county receive payments through Touchpay, a JPay competitor that often partners with foodservice giant Aramark.

Funding prisons out of the pockets of families and inmates has non-financial costs too, says Brian Nelson, who spent 28 years in an Illinois state prison for murder. Nelson says he has “become an asset to society” since he was released four years ago because he stayed in touch with family and priests even when he was in solitary confinement. When inmates can’t afford to maintain contact with the outside world, he says, they are less equipped to transition smoothly to civilian life.

The effect on poor families is especially harsh, Nelson says: “It’s a wife that has three children at home, and her husband is in jail, so now she has a choice: Do I send money to him so he can afford to stay in touch with the kids, or do I feed the kids?”

Inmates’ need for money is inescapable, Nelson says. Those in northern Illinois are not issued cold-weather clothes, he says, leaving them vulnerable to frostbite unless they can get money to pay for prison-approved long underwear and boots.

Razor Thin Margins

JPay founder Shapiro is eager to tell his company’s story and how he believes it helps families. It’s not just about faster payments. Once an inmate gains access to the money, JPay offers several ways to spend it, including pay-per-page e-messaging, music downloads and MP3 players. When inmates in some states are released, they receive their remaining money on JPay-branded payment cards that carry higher fees than those on most consumer payment cards.

Shapiro says that if his fees were any lower, his company would lose money. He declined to make the company’s financial details available and would not say how much he is paid.

Shapiro serves on the board of a foundation that advocates for inmates and carries full-page ads for JPay in its newsletters. The foundation received an $85,400 gift directly from JPay’s corporate treasury in 2009.

He lives on a tiny harbor island near the northern tip of Miami Beach in a home he bought for about a million dollars. Last year, through a company he controls called El Caballero LLC., Shapiro bought a custom powerboat, dubbed Sea Block, that retails for a half-million dollars.

Heading to the company’s headquarters one July morning, he stopped first for CrossFit, a military-style training regime that he enjoys because it brings out his competitive side, then for daily prayer.

Families who use JPay love the company, he says. He boasts of its well-trafficked Web forum and of the 174,000 “likes” on its Facebook page, where its marketers post cheery articles about incarceration. “The Jail Cats program at Gwinnett County Detention Center in Georgia is rescuing kittens and helping to rehabilitate incarcerated women,”one recent post read.

“We go out of our way to make sure that they feel comfortable — that, you know, you’re spending money with a company that cares about you,” Shapiro says.

If people don’t want to pay his fees, Shapiro says, they can always mail a money order, except in the “couple of states” that now charge fees for them.

Nearly 400,000 people are imprisoned in states where there is no free deposit option, a fact Shapiro was unaware of during a series of interviews this summer.

“When it’s up to us, it’s absolutely free,” he says.

Slow-Moving Money Orders

For the first 14 years of Eddie’s sentence, Pat Taylor mailed money orders directly to the prison at no charge beyond the cost of the money order and a stamp. Then last year, she was instructed to make the money order out to JPay and send it to a Florida post office box. The company would credit it to Eddie’s account.

Under the new system, she says, it would take weeks for Eddie to see funds sent via money order. So Pat, like nearly everyone else she knows, gave in and began paying $6.95 to send the money from her debit card.

Across the country, delays and other obstacles make the “free option” inaccessible to many families, the Center found. More than a dozen families in five different states said that money orders have been credited much more slowly since JPay took over.

Shapiro says he is “absolutely shocked” by the complaints that money orders are delayed because he had never heard of such problems before. Most money orders are processed within two to three days, he said, unless the person sending money fails to fill out the form properly. He said Virginia is especially efficient and processes money orders within 24 to 48 hours.

“We are not slowing it down, there is no conspiracy,” he said.

He said JPay does “want people to convert from a money order customer to a digital customer, absolutely,” but only because electronic payments are more efficient. “We’re not trying to make an extra dollar everywhere we can,” Shapiro said.

Before JPay, Virginia prisons credited money orders to inmates’ accounts in roughly three days, families say. Today, money orders can take more than a month to reach an inmate’s account, Marvin Rodriguez-Barrera, an inmate at Virginia’s high-security Red Onion State Prison, wrote in a letter to prisoners’ rights advocates in February.

Faster To Guatemala

“I am from Central America, and it is cheaper for my family, and easier, to send money to Guatemala than for my family to send me money from this very state!” Rodriguez-Barrera wrote. “The old way of using money orders was cheaper, easier and in many instances faster.”

Those seeking to avoid the fees by sending a money order must print and fill out a JPay-provided form whose instructions are dwarfed by large print barking at them to “Put down your pen! Put away your car keys!” because “There’s a faster way to send money, go to JPay.com and sign up now!”

The aggressive marketing has worked. One former marketing director for the company lists as a key accomplishment on his LinkedIn profile that he “Converted 78 percent” of money order users to online users, boosting the company’s annual revenue by $985,000.

Shapiro said the information in the profile, including the former employee’s title, was inaccurate. He said he didn’t have data on how many money order users convert to electronic payments or how much revenue the company gains when they make the switch.

Inside JPay’s secure, fishbowl-like money order processing room, reams of envelopes sit in postal bins on the shelves. Signs around the room remind the handful of workers employed there which states allow them to deduct a fee and which offer the service for free.

In Pennsylvania, the first state where JPay accepted money orders by mail, executives were surprised to see the number of money orders plunge by two-thirds in the first two months, Chief Financial Officer Mark Silverman explained in a brief interview.

Shapiro said that Missouri used to process 30,000 money orders a month before JPay came in.

“With JPay, we drove that down to only 1,000 people sending money,” he says. “And that’s by choice.”

During her twice-monthly visits to Bland, an isolated work camp nestled between rolling, green hills, Pat Taylor now sees JPay-branded fliers warning of the misery awaiting anyone who tries to use the “free option.”

On one side, a multi-ethnic lineup of models bury their faces in their hands and complain of what a “nightmare” it was to complete the money order, how it got lost or delayed.

“There’s a better way,” the flier promises on the reverse side, which depicts an attractive young woman seated with her laptop computer. For “Faster, Easier, Next-Day Delivery,” families can choose from a menu of high-fee options.

Tequila, Cigars And Lobbying

To impress state corrections officials and gain their business, JPay spends heavily on industry conventions attended by agency heads with contracting authority. During a 2012 convention of the American Correctional Association, the company threw what it called an “END OF THE WORLD PARTY” at a Denver wine bar that bills itself as “about you, and your inalienable right to the unbridled enjoyment of food and wine.”

For years, JPay has sponsored an award for former state corrections directors presented by the Association of State Correctional Administrators, paying for the recipient’s trip and a Wexford crystal bowl inscribed with the honoree’s name.

JPay’s outreach extends to state legislatures as well, even though many of the company’s contracts forbid it from using fee revenue to lobby. The company has hired registered lobbyists in at least seven states. Shapiro says JPay’s lawyers approved the use of company funds for that purpose.

In Ohio, it tapped Thomas Needles, a former aide to President George H. W. Bush. Needles gives generously to Republican candidates and also lobbies for for-profit universities. In Maryland, JPay hired Bruce Bereano, one of the state’s best-paid lobbyists, who was disbarred after a 1994 conviction for overbilling his clients and using the money for campaign donations.

The company also sought to lobby Washington for access to the federal Bureau of Prisons’ 216,000 inmates — what Shapiro has called “the mother ship of all contracts,” which is now held by Bank of America.

It spent $20,000 in 2012 to hire Park Strategies, run by former U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York, in an effort to obtain the contract. That effort was not successful.

More Inmates, Smaller Budgets

JPay was founded in 2002, just as the U.S. prison population neared the apex of a three-decade climb that more than quadrupled the number of inmates in state prisons. Shortly thereafter, as the economy went into recession, state budgets were squeezed and officials looked more aggressively for ways to cut spending on prisons.

Already, private vendors had stepped in with a solution: They would charge prisoners sky-high prices for phone services, snack foods, hygiene products and clothing, then return a large cut back to the prisons — often 40 percent or more.

Shapiro was the first entrepreneur to see how financial services might provide another stream of revenue. For a fee, he offered to deliver cash in ways that saved time and effort for corrections agencies, and often to give them a portion of the proceeds, just as the phone and commissary companies were doing.

“When we started, the states were very much saying to us, ‘There’s no need for procurement here because there’s no one else doing what you do,’ ” Shapiro said in a 2012 interview. Ten years later, he said, all of them were asking companies to submit bids for the work.

That doesn’t mean the door is open to competitors. Most states, including Virginia, now contract with JPay or its main competitor under a master agreement negotiated by Nevada in 2011 on behalf of a multi-state consortium. Participating states can simply sign on to the deal with one or both of the companies without the hassle of separately determining the best company for the job.

JPay is protected from other market forces, as well. When states offer its music players and tablet computers for sale to inmates, they often confiscate radios that people already own, according to inmates in Ohio. This leaves inmates dependent on JPay’s music downloads, which can cost 30 to 50 percent more than the same songs on iTunes, inmates say.

The profit-sharing arrangements are at the core of JPay’s origin story, Shapiro said in 2012. A couple of years out of college, he spent months driving around upstate New York, pitching JPay to “every sheriff, whether they had five inmates or 100 inmates” — without success.

Then someone in Passaic County, New Jersey, suggested that they offer the county 10 percent of their revenue, “so the jail would be less of a tax burden on the community.” The warden signed up on the spot.

Critics including Alex Friedmann, associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, an inmates’ advocacy group, says the profit-sharing amounts to a legal kickback. “They charge exhorbitant fees then kick back a percentage of their revenue. … The company doesn’t need that for profit,” Friedmann said.

Shapiro says he prefers the term “commission” because “the word kickback has a negative connotation, and it seems like some person is making that money and pocketing it and buying a Chevrolet or something, when in fact it’s going to use for the benefit of inmates — basketball hoops, volleyball, whatever.”

Most states put their share of the cash in an “Inmate Welfare Fund” that is supposed to be used for inmate benefits beyond what is guaranteed to them by law. As incarceration rates climbed, however, the definition of “inmate benefit” drifted, says Justin Jones, who was director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections until last year.

“The Legislature allowed us to broaden the definition of inmate welfare and it got to the point, almost anything they would fund through appropriations could now be paid for as inmate welfare,” he says. “It ended up where we started using that money if an inmate went out to medical on an emergency and medical was end-of-year short,” he says. “We bought air conditioners, ice machines, X-ray machines.”

Jones was not a fan of the system. If legislatures want to impose longer prison sentences or “if they create new crimes, then the legislature should appropriate dollars for that,” he says. “I should not have to go in and redefine and stretch the definition of inmate welfare accounts.”

Double Dipping

Taken together, JPay and other prison vendors create a system in which families are paying to send the money, and inmates are paying again to spend it, says Keith Miller, who is serving 21 ˝ years at Bland for a series of drug-related, violent crimes committed in his early 20s. The earliest he may be released is 2021, when his mother will be 87 years old.

“The fact that [my mother] has to pay the fees to send the money and then the fact that [prison agencies] make a certain cut off it seems to me that [the prisons are] double-dipping into the money they’re sending,” he said in an interview at the prison. “It really doesn’t make sense to me that this should be allowed.”

Shapiro is skeptical that JPay’s fees make much of a difference for inmates’ families. He says companies that provide other services to inmates, such as phones and commissary, are the real problem.

“Compared to the commissary or phone revenue, we’re just a drop in the bucket,” he says.

That may be changing.

Last year, the Federal Communications Commission dusted off a 12-year-old petition filed by inmates’ families who argued that prison phone rates were unfairly high, preventing them from maintaining contact with loved ones. The commission capped rates for many calls under its authority to ensure that pay-phone rates are just, fair and reasonable.

Mignon Clyburn, who was acting chairwoman of the FCC when it passed the rate cap and now serves as one of three commissioners, says the action was necessary because people are “making unspeakable sacrifices to stay in touch with their loved ones.”

Vincent Townsend, president of Pay-Tel Communications, a major provider of phones for inmates, said his industry “abused the public.”

‘Ethical, Right, Moral’

Other prison vendors “better pay attention to what’s ethical, right, moral,” he said. “Because if you don’t then some regulator’s going to step in, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”

There is a crucial difference: The telephone industry is closely regulated by the FCC, which has explicit authority to set rates for pay-phone calls. Financial and consumer protection regulators have less power over pricing.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau can sue companies for offering unfair, deceptive or abusive financial services. The bureau declined more than a dozen requests to discuss specific issues related to prison financial services.

The Federal Trade Commission, which has consumer-protection authority and the power to ensure that markets are competitive, declined to comment “on specific companies or conduct.”

Regulators in seven states have levied fines totaling $408,500 against JPay for operating without a license. The actions were not designed to disrupt its business, according to the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, a trade group that represents these regulators in Washington.

“State banking regulators are concerned with ensuring that businesses operating in their states are properly licensed and with enforcing applicable laws (including consumer protection laws),” the group’s spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

‘Invent A Better Way’

Shapiro says he understands the challenges faced by poor families of inmates since JPay’s startup days, when he would spend “hours on the phone with a grandmother, talking about her day at Wal-Mart.”

He says he feels trapped by the structure of the industry he has come to dominate. He wishes the fees were lower, that states didn’t force him to charge more and give them a share and that he could “invent a better way” than asking people’s families to help pay for their imprisonment.

Yet Shapiro says he is satisfied to compete within what he admits is a broken system, even if the system may be punishing some innocent family members.

For many families, JPay has become that system. When Jewel Miller, 80, phoned JPay’s call center last month to ask why her payments are delayed, and why she must submit the same form every time she sends a money order to Keith, the operator hung up on her.

In a series of interviews it became clear that Shapiro was unaware of some of the fees related to his business. He said he did not know, for example, that Florida now charges its own fee for money order deposits after JPay processes the payments.

These fees are spelled out in JPay’s contracts with states, which Shapiro signed. Florida’s says it will charge a 50 cent “Money Order by Mail” fee.

As of July, Shapiro was unaware of JPay’s own $1.95 fee to deposit money orders in Indiana, declaring, “If someone sends $100 with a money order to an Indiana inmate, that inmate gets $100. … I am positive.”

Two days later, he called back to say, “We’re working with the states right now to get some of those fees taken off.”

Sarah Pahl, a policy attorney at the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, testified yesterday to the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee on the subject of "the widespread storage and sale of criminal records information."

[P]rivate entities that purchase criminal records – whether from county and district courts, TDCJ, or elsewhere – are not routinely notified of updates reflecting orders of nondisclosure, expunction, or even final dispositions.

Countless individuals are adversely affected by this practice that encourages the widespread dissemination of outdated and incorrect criminal records.

In that document, she observed in a footnote, "The number of individual offenders in the state criminal history file was 11,824,200." I understand being surprised, though, that's a vast figure. I recall former state Sen. Elliot Shapleigh being similarly shocked when he learned that more than ten percent of Texans at any given time were wanted by the police. (Not to get sidetracked, but much of that has to do with the wretched Driver (Ir)Responsibility Surcharge.)

In any event, here are Pahl's/TCJC's IMO well-considered recommendations:

Restrict the sale of criminal history record information to private entities until a final case disposition is entered

Prohibit the bulk sale of criminal history record information and mug shots.

Alternatively, allow the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to be the only clearinghouse for the sale of criminal records, which will ensure uniformity of all record sales and compliance with updates to records (e.g., orders of nondisclosure and expunction).

Further, Pahl suggested the state "Reform the qualifications and procedures related to orders of nondisclosure, which limit access to (vs. completely expunge) criminal records." In particular, they should:

Expand the eligibility criteria for nonviolent offenses and reduce waiting times before being permitted to petition for orders of nondisclosure.

Reform the e-filling system to allow for a streamlined web-based petition process that allows individuals to petition without an attorney.

Prohibit the forfeiture of the right to nondisclosure in plea agreements.

Prohibit third parties from asking individuals to request records that are subject to an order of nondisclosure.

On expunction, Pahl suggested the Legislature should:

Expand eligibility criteria required to expunge criminal records.

Provide automatic expunctions of arrest records for cases that do not result in a conviction.

Allow judges to automatically expunge records for those who successfully complete specialty court programs.
Require filing attorneys to be served with notice by anyone who files an answer to a petition for expunction.

Require the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to certify compliance with orders of expunction.
Go here to see her full testimony, these are just top-line excerpts.

In the interest of full disclosure, your correspondent is currently performing consulting work for TCJC on a separate matter. I suppose Grits should also mention that I testified at the same Senate State Affairs Committee meeting on behalf of the Texas Electronic Privacy Coalition regarding the committee's interim charges on requiring warrants for electronic metadata, which was a bit of a surreal experience. More later on how that went.

According to this list on the Attorney General's website, there have been 3,680 peole who've died in custody of state and local law enforcement in Texas since 2005, which seems like a remarkable number - roughly one per day. Nearly half the deaths happened in TDCJ units. Here's an notepad file with a list of the deceased.

In the wake of a national frenzy over the video of an NFL star punching his wife, we learn that Texas ranked 16th in the number of females murdered by men in single victim/single offender homicides, according to a new report by the Violence Policy Center titled, "When Men Murder Women" (pdf, see Appendix 1, pp 9-10). Alaska topped the chart at 2.57 such murders per 100,000 women, followed by South Carolina (2.06), Oklahoma (2.03), Louisiana (1.92), and Mississippi (1.89). The lowest rate was in New Hampshire at .30 per 100,000 women.

Based just on the raw numbers in this report, Texas had the second highest total number of such killings after California, which makes sense since they're the two most populous states. In 2012, California had 18.4% more women murdered by a single male offender than Texas - 212 compared to 179. But because the Golden State's population is so much greater, California's per-capita rate is lower - 1.11 per 100,000 women in 2012 compared to 1.37 in Texas (i.e., Texas' per-capita rate is 23% higher than California's, which was tied for 27th).

Sixteenth isn't great - New Jersey is ranked 33rd, for example, and the per-capita rate there is only .90 per 100K. But this is one list where I'm relieved to find my home state isn't leading the pack.

New data out on Texas prison crime and violence from the TDCJ office of inspector general: Mike Ward at the Houston Chronicle reported last month ("Prison crime not dropping with the population," June 20) that, "New statistics obtained by the Chronicle show that 3,001 criminal charges have been referred against imprisoned felons since 2009. Another 584 charges have been referred against correctional officers. Those numbers generally appear to be holding steady so far this year, even as the number of inmates housed in Texas prisons has dropped during the same period."

Also, "93 correctional officers faced criminal charges last year for crimes inside prisons, ranging from bribery to theft to sexual assault to official oppression. That is down from a high of 154 in 2009, according to the statistics made available under the Texas Public Information Act." Also, Ward suggested:
If the rate of prison crimes is staying roughly the same, other statistics underscore that cell block conditions are not improving much – and may be getting tougher. In April, officers reported using chemical agents on unruly felons 403 times, compared with an average of 262 times a month last year. Some 104 offender assaults were reported in March, compared with an average of 85 a month last year.

Despite the currently lower population of Texas convicts – just under 151,000 were housed in the 109 state prisons this week, about 9,000 fewer than roughly a decade ago – [TDCJ inspector general Bruce] Toney and other prison officials said they do not expect the number of prison crimes to decline much.

In addition to the stats, Ward supplied this remarkable anecdote as evidence of increased violence in Texas prisons, in this case instigated by staff:

Officials and guards acknowledge that the new numbers underscore that the Lone Star State's maximum-security lockups are living up to their long-standing tough reputation.

A March 17 beating at the Gib Lewis Unit near Woodville, in deep East Texas, highlights that.

There, shortly after 11 p.m., seven men stormed into a prison cell and began punching the inmate inside, a convicted Tarrant County burglar serving a two-year sentence. "Beat his a--," the attackers shouted over and over, as they held the inmate by throat, according to an internal report of the incident obtained by the Chronicle.

This, however, was no usual prison beat-down: The attackers were uniformed prison guards, led by a veteran lieutenant and a sergeant.

Investigators said both supervisors have been fired, and all seven guards now face charges of official oppression. The reason for the attack was that the convict, who had a history of harassing jailers, earlier had threatened a female guard.

As for the convict, he was paroled last week after serving about nine months, they said.

Good report (read the whole thing), but I'd be cautious in interpreting any one year increase or decrease too strictly; these are relatively small numbers and changes could result from a variety of factors. E.g., TDCJ has cracked down on contraband cases but that doesn't mean more contraband is coming in than before, only that the agency is now making a greater effort to enforce the rules.

And as an aside, God bless Mike Ward. If anything ever happens to him, there won't be one reporter left in the state consistently covering agency-level issues at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

CANTON, Texas (AP) — More than 120 inmates have been moved from an East Texas jail because the locks are not working properly.

The Van Zandt County Sheriff’s Office did not report any escapes from the main jail in Canton, 50 miles southeast of Dallas.

Sheriff Michael Lindsey Ray said Tuesday that inmates figured out a way to compromise the locking systems. Details weren’t released.

Ray says contractors must replace internal components of the defective locks. The fixes could take two weeks.

Prisoners were transferred to jails in Henderson, Kaufman and Upshur counties after the lock problems were discovered Monday. Van Zandt County will pay about $30 per inmate, per day.

The county’s minimum security jail has a different locking system and those inmates are not affected.

April

A Case to Rattle Anyone's Confidence in Texas' Criminal-Justice System

Call it the case of the forgotten inmate. Or call it "one of those
1-in-a-million deals," to use the words of a former lawyer for the inmate.

Either way, if this one doesn't rattle confidence in Texas' criminal justice
system, maybe nothing does.

Jerry Hartfield, 57, with an IQ in the 50s, has been an inmate in state prisons
for more than three decades, even though there has been no lawful conviction on
the books to hold him there. But there he'll stay for now, after a judge in
Matagorda County denied a petition for his immediate release last week.

The string of lapses is all the more outrageous considering the delayed justice
for a murder victim, Eunice Job Lowe, 55, of Bay City. A ticket agent at a bus
terminal, she was robbed and fatally beaten with a pickaxe in 1976.

Hartfield, 21 at the time, had been working construction nearby and was
arrested within days in Wichita, Kan. Investigators got a confession from him
that was used to convict and send him to death row - a sentence that might not
be possible today, given new restrictions on executing the intellectually
disabled.

Hartfield's lawyers have contested that confession. They used an insanity
defense at trial, calling witnesses who described him "as crazy a human being
as there ever was."

The conviction was overturned 3 years later based on faulty jury selection, and
the state unsuccessfully appealed. Now comes the confusion: Gov. Mark White
commuted Hartfield's death sentence to life in 1983, even though the conviction
had been overturned.

Hartfield was moved from death row, presumably to await a new trial, but that
new trial never came. Absent an execution threat, Hartfield's lawyers didn't
pursue a retrial, nor did prosecutors. Hartfield, a 5th-grade dropout, didn't
grasp the status of his case until a fellow inmate dug into it in 2006.

With the case revived, Hartfield's new lawyers won a round last year, when the
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the life sentence imposed through
commutation was invalid.

Hartfield's appellate lawyer now argues - and who could disagree? - that his
right to a speedy trial has been grossly violated, he suffered prolonged
incarceration and he should be freed. The district attorney's contemptible
response: Hartfield "failed to proffer any evidence he wanted a speedy trial
during this period." Please. The lapses are nauseating enough without that
nonsense.

Different attorneys are now preparing for a new trial, despite skepticism that
a fair trial is possible. Key evidence is missing, including the murder weapon,
and witnesses have died.

However this embarrassment works out, the long list of failures will outnumber
the winners in this case. Swift and sure justice has already lost in
spectacular fashion.

Case Chronology

1976 - Eunice Job Lowe is fatally beaten with a pickaxe in Bay City.

1977 - Jerry Hartfield, a 5th-grade dropout, is convicted and sentenced to die.

1980 - The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturns the conviction and orders
a new trial based on faulty jury selection. Neither side seeks a new trial.

1983 - Gov. Mark White commutes the death sentence to life in prison, despite
the overturned conviction.

2006 - A fellow prisoner discovers Hartfield's case has been in legal limbo.

2013 - The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms unanimously that there was
no sentence to commute in 1983.

Last week - A state district judge in Matagorda County denies a petition for
Hartfield's release; preparations for a new trial are underway.

The Texas Observer has a lengthy article by Robyn Ross on prisoners funerals at the prison cemetery in Huntsville with the same title as this post. Here's a notable excerpt, but the whole article is worth to read:
+Of the roughly 450 inmates who die in Texas prisons each year, about 100 are laid to rest in Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery. Whether they die in one of the state’s 109 prison units, at the TDCJ hospital in Galveston, or at the prison system’s hospice facility near Palestine, the inmate’s family has the option to claim the body and make funeral arrangements of their choice. When family members can’t be located, or when they decline to claim the body, the state picks up the tab for the funeral and buries the body in TDCJ’s Byrd Cemetery.

The most common reason families don’t claim the body is that they can’t afford to, Chaplain Collier says. Some, like the family that attended today’s visitation at Grace Baptist Church, will decline to claim the body but then attend services in Huntsville. Prison funerals are generally held on Thursdays, unless the deceased has been executed, in which case the burial is often performed the following day; the accelerated schedule saves families who come to witness the execution from having to make a second trip to Huntsville. A typical Thursday may have one or two funerals. Collier says he’s done as many as nine in one day.

He estimates that 60 percent of the services he performs are directs. Sometimes next of kin can’t be located. Other families can’t afford to travel to Huntsville. “You’ve got some that may be in Amarillo, and to come down here is too much,” Collier says. “And I buried one last week that was 80-something years of age, and he probably outlived most of his family.”

If no family or friends attend, the inmates of the cemetery grounds crew stand witness in their stead. These “offenders,” as TDCJ calls them, typically don’t know the deceased, unless the person died at the Walls Unit.

“It’s humbling,” says Lawerence Lacour, 26, who digs graves and serves as a pallbearer. He’s done other manual labor in the four years he’s served on a drug-related sentence, but this is different. “Especially as a Christian, in this situation I think that I could myself die, because tomorrow’s not promised to anybody.”

Real interesting story by Michael Hoinski at Texas Monthly on "pańos, the handkerchiefs that prisoners decorate with black ballpoint pens or colored pencils—or, in a pinch, with coffee beans, ash, and even egg yolk (it makes a nice yellow color).

They've been outlawed in Texas prisons, but prisoners keep making them and art collectors are snatching them up.

In a case that could portend the future for heat-related lawsuits against sweltering Texas prisons, a federal judge has ruled that overheated cell blocks on Louisiana’s death row constitute cruel and unusual punishment and are illegal.

Thursday’s decision by Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson, in a case filed by three condemned prisoners who suffer from medical and disability issues that make them more susceptible to high heat, ordered the Louisiana Department of Corrections to come up with a plan to cool down death row at the state penitentiary in Angola to no more than 88 degrees.

While it's clear Texas pols will never pay for cooling Texas' prisons of their own accord, in the end federal judges may leave them no choice. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes both Texas and Louisiana, already greenlighted Texas' essentially similar litigation.

Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it
supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards
for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or
killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners
every year - men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu
Ghraib a run for their money.

While there's plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities
described in this series have all of the problems we explore, some stand out as
particularly bad actors. We've compiled this subjective list of America's 10
worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of
research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with criminal-justice
reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to
infamy.

We will be rolling out profiles of all of the contenders in the coming days,
complete with photos and video. Now let's head on down to Texas to visit our
second contender, where condemned men (even severely mentally ill ones) spend
their final years under what are arguably the nation's harshest death-row
conditions.

Allan B. Polunsky Unit, a.k.a. death row (Livingston, Texas)

Number of prisoners: 300

Who's in charge: Richard Alford, former warden at Polunksy, he now oversees all
the region's prisons; Oliver Bell, chairman, Texas Board of Criminal Justice

The basics: "The most lethal [death row] anywhere in the democratic world" is
also probably "the hardest place to do time in Texas," writes Robert Perkinson,
author of the book TexasTough. Indeed, the all-solitary Allan B. Polunsky Unit
houses condemned Texans under some of the nation's harshest death row
conditions. The prisoners are housed in single cells on 22-hour-a-day lockdown,
and even during their daily "recreation" hour, they are confined in separate
cages. With no access to phones, televisions, contact visits, they remain in
essentially a concrete tomb (PDF) until execution day - a stretch of at least 3 years for the mandatory appeals, and far longer if they opt to keep fighting.

Some have been known to commit suicide or waive their appeals rather than
continue living under such conditions.

The backlash: At Polunsky, the "emotional torture" of awaiting death in total
isolation is "driving men out of their minds," former prisoner Anthony Graves
told senators last year at the 1st-ever Judiciary Committee hearing on solitary
confinement. "I would watch guys come to prison totally sane and in 3 years
they don't live in the real world anymore," recalled Graves, who was exonerated
in 2010, after spending more than 18 years on death row.

Graves detailed for the senators some of the profoundly erratic behavior of his
fellow prisoners. "I know a guy who would sit in the middle of the floor, rip
his sheet up, wrap it around himself, and light it on fire. Another guy...would
take his feces and smear it all over his face as though he was in military
combat."

This man, Graves added, was ruled competent for execution. While on the gurney,
"he was babbling incoherently to the officers, 'I demand that you release me
soldier, this is your captain speaking.' These were the words coming out of a
man's mouth, who was driven insane by the prison conditions, as the poison was
being pumped into his arms."

Another prisoner, a paranoid schizophrenic named Andre Thomas, scooped out his
eye and ate it during his stay at Polunsky. He, too, remains on track for
execution. It is perhaps no wonder that Dallas insurance executive Charles
Terrell asked to have his name removed from the facility after it became death
row.

The Austin Statesman's Jonathon Tilove had a story over the weekend (Prisoners can't vote but they can subtly effect political power," Nov. 30) on the impact of urban convicts housed in rural prisons on state and local redistricting, a topic this blog has addressed numerous times over the years. The story hones in on the difference between how counties handle prisoners when drawing commissioners court precincts compared to they're counted for state legislative districts. Prisoners can't vote in Texas until they're "off paper" (i.e, when their sentence is finished, including any time on parole), but they're included in Census population counts that inform redistricting decisions.

Bottom line: There are many rural counties that exclude prisoners from their counts because most or all of some precincts (each county is divided into four) would be populated by inmates if they were included in the count. But state lawmakers have balked at changing where inmates are counted to reflect their home counties because, particularly for state rep districts, it artificially boosts representation for GOP-leaning rural districts, inflating their number and diminishing the number of voters making up "blue" districts in urban centers. Unfortunately, it's state lawmakers who decide where inmates should be counted and, with the present Republican majority, that makes this a partisan political hot potato at the capitol.

The issue has been raised most prominently over the years by a group called the Prison Policy Initiative, and it was a new analysis from them that spawned this article. Here's a notable excerpt describing their findings:
“We found that most of the areas that gain additional political clout from prison gerrymandering on the state level reject the prison counts when they draw local districts,” said Peter Wagner, executive director of the Prison Policy Initiative, which he founded as a student at Western New England College School of Law more than a decade ago. “Our research confirms that faced with the absurd prospect of drawing a city or county district that is mostly — or even entirely — incarcerated, local governments are leading the way in rejecting prison gerrymandering.”

At its most absurd, had Garza County, population 6,461, not excluded the 1,995 residents of the Giles W. Dalby Correctional Facility from its redistricting, an entire precinct would have been made up of “criminal aliens” awaiting deportation, with not a voter among them.

The Prison Policy Initiative’s inventory listed 64 Texas cities and counties with what the report calls the greatest “potential distortion” — a measure of how much of a potential district could be populated by prisoners. All but nine have chosen to exclude that population in redistricting.

Yet in drawing state legislative districts there remains a strong rural rooting interest in maintaining the census practice of counting prisoners — just like college students, barracked stateside military personnel, and migrant workers — where they find them to be mostly living and sleeping on Census Day, and then including them in that count when drawing state House, state Senate and U.S. House district lines.

Why? Because those prisoners pad the population of sparsely settled rural districts, sustaining a House or Senate seat with far fewer eligible voters than other districts, undermining the principle of one-man, one-vote, and potentially someday affecting the balance of power in the Legislature because, in Texas, seven of the nine House districts with the largest prison populations are represented by Republicans.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative's website, 40 Texas counties exclude prisoners when drawing local precincts, even though all of them benefit at the statehouse from extra representation because of inmates counted there. They are: Anderson, Bastrop, Bee, Bowie, Brazoria, Brown, Burnet, Cherokee, Childress, Concho, Coryell, Dawson, DeWitt, Dickens, Duval, Fannin, Freestone, Frio, Garza, Hale, Haskell, Houston, Howard, Jack, Jones, Karnes, Kinney, La Salle, Live Oak, Madison, Medina, Mitchell, Pecos, Potter, Reeves, Rusk, Terry, Walker, Wichita, Willacy. Prisoners in those counties are being treated as political footballs - counted when it benefits local pols and discounted whenever it serves their interests. Hard not to view the whole situation as an expression of political cynicism, but then, that's true of the redistricting process in general, isn't it?

The Statesman story notes that Rep. Harold Dutton for years has championed counting Texas prisoners at their last known home addresses for purposes of redistricting, but the partisan aspects of the issue have continually thwarted him. Two states - Maryland and New York - have already changed where they count prisoners. Two more - California and Delaware - will make the switch with the 2020 Census. Grits would like to see Texas rationalize this mess by 2020 as well, but as long as the topic is considered through the lens of state-level partisanship instead of county-level pragmatism, changing it in the near future would be an uphill climb.

To complete the picture 67,000 people were locked up in Texas county jails.

Adjusting the calculation, around 3.7% of Texas adults were under control of the Texas justice system in 2012, not including those caught up in the federal system. That's about one in 27 adult Texans; still a large number, but down from one in 22 just a few years ago, when the state justice system supervised some 4.6% of Texas adults.

By that measure, the proportion of Texas' adults under control of the justice system has dropped around 20% [(4.6-3.7)/4.6] in the last five years, with incarceration levels plateauing, then dropping slightly, as the overall state population continued to rise. We still imprison more people than any other state, even California, whose population is much larger than Texas', but the ever-upward trend witnessed over the last two decades has been at least momentarily checked.

The next challenge: Texas needs to direct more funding to diversion programming and adjust sentencing categories downward for certain low-level nonviolent offenses. The 2007 investments worked but aren't enough by themselves to reduce incarceration further without additional reforms.

New limitations on proxy marriage in Texas — a measure legislators passed last session to prevent benefits and insurance fraud — will also rule out tying the knot for people who are incarcerated.

House Bill 869, which takes effect Sept. 1, will no longer allow those seeking proxy marriages — weddings where either the bride or groom or both are not physically present — to appoint another person to stand in during the ceremony, unless they are serving in the military and stationed outside of the country.

(Click Here to see a video about how the new law will affect prisoners who want to get married.)

Because marriages cannot be conducted inside Texas prisons, inmates have relied on such stand-ins to get married while they are incarcerated.

The 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision Turner v. Safley preserves an inmate’s right to get married. But without changes to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) policy that prohibits weddings from being conducted inside prison facilities, inmates will no longer be able to get hitched until they’re released.

Jason Clark, a TDCJ spokesman, wrote in an email that the agency has no policy changes planned. The bill “will have no foreseeable [effect] on the agency or [its] policies,” he wrote.

The bill is intended to crack down on cases where people have fraudulently sought marriage licenses by proxy without the other person's knowledge in order to receive insurance or other entitlement benefits. Scott Riling, chief of staff for the bill's author, state Rep. Trent Ashby, R-Lufkin, cited the case of a Houston County woman who re-married an incarcerated ex-husband by proxy without his knowledge to rake in insurance benefits after he died. The inmate's daughter discovered the re-marriage after her father's death and sued; the woman is now in prison for the fraud, a third-degree felony.

“The purpose of the bill was not to make it harder for people to get married,” Riling said. “It was to protect those that might become prey to unscrupulous people.”

The bill saw little opposition during the legislative process, Riling said. It also flew under the radar for a number of inmate advocacy groups.
“I wasn’t following it that closely and was surprised when it went through,” said Jennifer Erschabek, executive director of the Texas Inmate Families Association. “I don’t know if there was a lot of information out there about this bill.”

Most prison inmates, she said, might not find out about the changes until after the bill takes effect.

“You don’t realize it can’t happen until you’re down the road… and then find out all of a sudden that you are no longer able to be married,” she said.

Advocates for inmates say building relationships, such as marriages, can help people who are incarcerated improve their behavior and incentivize reintegration into society.

Proxy marriage “gives an inmate something to take advantage of,” said former inmate and Texas Cure Executive Director Michael Jewell, who was married by proxy in 2005. Marriage “gives him an anchor out here in the free world."

“I see a great deal of harm” in the proxy marriage changes, added Jewell, who served 40 years in prison for murder before being released on parole in 2010.

“There are probably several guys inside anticipating proxy marriage.”

Jewell said while he was incarcerated, proxy marriages were “a fairly regular occurrence” — he estimated he witnessed at least half a dozen a year. The TDCJ does not keep statistics on proxy marriages that occur while inmates are incarcerated.

Ann Staggs coordinates proxy marriages hosted by The Prison Show, a longtime Houston radio program for inmates and their families. In the past sixteen years, Staggs has coordinated about 30 proxy marriages to and among inmates, starting with her own on the air in December 1997.

It is “a lot more work to be married to an incarcerated person,” she said. “It’s hard to fight long distance, and the making up is not quite as much fun.”

Despite the challenges, Staggs said marriages by proxy, including her own, can be rewarding.

“The men that have someone that they know is to be a permanent part of their life seem to do better in prison than the ones that don’t,” she said.

Proxy Marriage Changes, Explained

This animation illustrates how to be married by proxy and how the changes proposed by House Bill 869 place restrictions on the process. Unless TDCJ changes its policies, inmates will no longer be able to get married under the new legislation.

A loophole in Texas law is opening the cell doors for hundreds of convicted killers and other violent criminals and setting dates for their early release.

All inmates convicted between the year 1977 and 1987 will be released from prison after the number of days they have spent in jail and the number of days they have spent in good conduct equals one-third of their initial sentence, according to the Texas parole guide.

In 1987 the law was amended to exclude violent criminals. But the amendment only applies to violent criminals convicted after 1987.

Among those up for release is Genene Jones, 63, a Texas nurse found guilty in 1984 of injecting 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan with a fatal dose of a muscle relaxant. She was sentenced to 99 years. In addition, she got 60 concurrent years for an attack on another child who survived. Nevertheless, she is scheduled to be released on Feb. 24, 2018, after serving 35 years, according to state records.

David Port, 46, was found guilty in 1985 of abducting and shooting postal worker Deborah Sue Schatz, 23, in the head. He was sentenced to 75 years in prison, but will be released on June 5, 2014, according to state records.

Over 1,000 individuals convicted of a crime and imprisoned in Texas between 1977 and 1987 are eligible for mandatory release. Many of these individuals were convicted of nonviolent crimes. It is estimated, however, that hundreds of these inmates were convicted of murder, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice statistics obtained by ABC News.

The office of Gov. Rick Perry said there is nothing they can do about the release of violent convicts.

"Offender release is governed by law in effect when the offense was committed and cannot constitutionally be changed retroactively," Rich Parsons, deputy director of communications for the governor's office, said in a statement to ABC News.

"The governor, like all Texans, expects the Parole Division of TDCJ to closely supervise offenders according to their release rules to ensure public protection," Parsons said.

Andy Kahan, a victim's advocate working out of the mayor's office in Houston, Texas, works with the families of murder victims to keep their loved ones' killers in prison.

"Most families I have reached out to were unaware that these people would be released from prison," he said.

Kahan is working on the behalf of victims' families like the McClellans and Schatzs to keep the killers of their loved ones in prison.

"In most of these cases there is little or any recourse," Kahan said.

In April 2013, Vincent Earl Cox, was released from prison after he was convicted of murdering an 8-year-old boy in 1980. He was supposed to serve a 99 year sentence.

But in some cases Kahan has had success.

Coral Eugene Watts, a convicted serial killer serving a 60 year sentence, was scheduled for mandatory release in 2006. Watts was ultimately not released after it was discovered he had murdered an additional victim. Watts was found guilty of the murder and re-sentenced to life in prison.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) on Sunday praised a Florida jury's decision to find
former neighborhood watchmen George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon
Martin, and insisted that the case had not been influenced by race because "the
justice system is color blind."

"A very thoughtful case was made by each side, the jurors made the decision and
we will live with that," the governor explained to CNN's Candy Crowley.

The CNN host, however, pointed out that critics of the verdict had asserted
that the justice system was innately unfair and weighted against
African-Americans.

"Do you think that?" Crowley asked.

"I don't," Perry insisted. "I think our justice system is color blind, and I
think that, you know, again, you don't find people that always agree with the
jury's decision. But that's the reason we have the system we have in place, and
I think, by and large, it may not be full proof, people may make mistakes in
the jury system. On the civil side, you have that appellate process."

"But in this case, I will suggest that 2 extraordinarily capable teams laid out
the issues and that jury made the right decision from their stand point."

Earlier this year, a New York Times editorial ripped the Texas justice system
for executing a disproportionate number of African-Americans under Perry.

"Texas's death penalty system is notorious for its high tolerance of
ineffective counsel for defendants, overly zealous prosecutors, and racial
discrimination in jury selection," the Times wrote. "In Texas as well as other
states, a black person who murders a white person is more likely to receive the
death penalty than when the victim is black."

(Source: The Raw Story)

Discussion On Bill To Improve Criminal Justice System Focuses On Data Collection

By Claire Cardona
ccardona@dallasnews.com
April 10, 2013

AUSTIN — To maintain consistent and comprehensive information on offender recidivism rates, the author of a bill suggesting changes to Texas Department of Criminal Justice operations addressed the importance of data collection.

Rep. Four Price, R-Amarillo, said his bill would address the most glaring need in the department and the Windham School District, the Correctional Managed Health Care Committee and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which the department works in conjunction with.

“The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” Price said, referring to a lack of data flow between the different agencies.

TDCJ Executive Director Brad Livingston said he didn’t think the bill would require a fiscal note and that they could create the data warehouse with what means and technology are currently available.

“They do not have all the technical assistance they need to have comprehensive data management,” she said. “That takes money and we’re far away in our mind from having a comprehensive database system that can be shared.”

The bill would also extend the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s existence until 2021, which Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations at Texas District and County Attorneys Association joked is the most important thing the bill does (“We can’t let all those people go free.”) The routine Sunset Advisory Commission report recommendations that the bill addresses examined the impact of policy changes to the criminal justice system enacted six years ago and found the need for a risk and needs assessment and a case management system.

Price’s bill addresses the concerns and would require the department to create a comprehensive treatment plan for all offenders that looks into recidivism factors such as substance abuse, family dysfunction, anti-social personality and criminal behavior. It would also urge the department agencies to establish a clear re-entry plan that is well-coordinated so groups that monitor re-entry success in communities don’t duplicate programs.

The bill was left pending. Its companion has passed through the Senate with some amendments that would allow other medical schools aside from University of Texas Medical Branch and Texas Tech, which provide the medical care to inmates, to sit on a committee for the inmate medical program.

2 inmates with long criminal histories - including 1 awaiting trial for capital murder - escaped an East Texas jail, dumped their black-and-white scrubs and were fleeing a manhunt Tuesday, authorities said.

Brian Allen Tucker of Sulphur Springs and John Marlin King of Cumby slipped past a fence around a recreation yard at the Hopkins County Jail around 8 a.m. Tuesday, officials with the Hopkins County Sheriff's Office said.

The 2 men dumped their jail uniforms on rail tracks near the jail, Deputy Alvin Jordan said. They had white T-shirts and boxer shorts on underneath, and Sheriff Butch Adams said it was possible they had clothes stashed on the outside.

"Certainly, we're going to do our best to get them back," Adams told reporters. "We have a lot of help here from other counties and jurisdictions."

Dispatcher Beth Renfro said a maintenance person noticed a problem with the fence around a recreation yard used by female inmates at the jail in Sulphur Springs, about 75 miles northeast of Dallas. Jordan said the men either slipped through a gap in the fence or they scaled it.

Hours later, deputies and other law enforcement were searching the woods and area east and northeast of the jail.

Tucker was being held on $1 million bond in the 2011 death of Bobby Riley of Mahoney. Riley was found strangled in his home and some music instruments and firearms had been stolen. Jury selection in his murder trial was set to begin June 3.

Tucker was previously convicted of burglary and driving while intoxicated, and has been arrested several times for violating parole.

King was being held on several charges, including evading arrest, burglary and possession of a controlled substance. He's been convicted previously of burglary and possession of a controlled substance. According to court documents, he pleaded guilty last month to the possession charge as a habitual offender and received a sentence of 40 years in prison.

Local schools were locked down as a precaution, though classes were continuing as normal, an official for the Sulphur Springs schools said.

Kris Mitchell, who lives across a field from where officers were focusing their search, said she was telling her family to lock their doors and stay vigilant.

"This land is all ponds, tree lines and brush," Mitchell said. "You could hide pretty easily, I think."

(Source: Associated Press)

MARCH 05, 2013

'The Case For Independent Oversight Of Texas' Prison System'

The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition issued a press release today in support of three bills establishing independent oversight and accountability for TDCJ's facilities and treatment of prisoners.

They recommend that the Legislature:

(1) Support H.B. 877 by Representative Alma Allen, which will develop an independent body tasked with comprehensive oversight of all TDCJ correctional facilities; that committee will conduct regular facility inspections and compile comprehensive reports outlining the results of those inspections, as well as providing any recommendations concerning policy changes or other strategies that could improve the conditions or operations of Texas’ correctional facilities.

(2) Support H.B. 968 by Representative Sylvester Turner, which calls for TDCJ to annually compile a comprehensive report clarifying the number of grievances filed and appealed at each unit, information about the ultimate resolution of such grievances, needed resources at the unit level and across units that will enable facilities to effectively mitigate problems, and any identified patterns of commonly recurring problems.

(3) Support H.B. 1543 by Representative Alma Allen, which allows the current Independent Ombudsman for the Texas Juvenile Justice Department to visit with youth who have been sent to adult secure facilities.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
^Former prison guards are charged with racketeering for allegedly smuggling cell phones
^Officials say prison inmates used the phones to plot serious crimes, including killings
^The arrests of 17 former corrections officers were part of Operation Prison Cell

(CNN) -- How were inmates inside a Texas prison allegedly able to make cell phone calls, plot crimes and acquire drugs?

With the help of 17 former corrections officers who once worked at the prison, according to a federal grand jury indictment unsealed this week.

Now the former officers and 12 others have been arrested and charged with racketeering after a four-year investigation authorities dubbed Operation Prison Cell.

The former guards are accused of involvement in a smuggling scheme that undermined the justice system, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson told reporters Wednesday.

"Prison is a place where inmates are supposed to do their time," he said, "not where they do their crime."

Using the cell phones guards smuggled in, prison inmates orchestrated and facilitated killings, home invasions and drug trafficking, said Angela Dodge, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office.

The indictment released Wednesday accuses 13 former corrections officers of smuggling cell phones into the McConnell Unit Prison in Beeville, Texas, about 200 miles southwest of Houston.

"The employees supplied the phones, knowing the inmates would use the phones to conduct illegal activities," the indictment says.

A four-year investigation into the "culture of corruption" at the prison began after authorities caught gang members trying to transport stolen cars that were destined for Mexican cartel members across the border, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas said Wednesday.

Prison inmates using illegal cell phones were behind the thwarted attempt to move the stolen cars into Mexico, prosecutors said.

Nationwide, the smuggling of contraband cell phones into prisons is a growing problem, the U.S. General Accountability Office said in a 2011 report, noting that the number of smuggled phones seized had quadrupled in a three-year period.

In 2007 an inmate at a Maryland detention center ordered the murder of a witness to his crimes using a contraband phone, the report said.

And in 2008, a death row inmate in a Texas state prison used a cell phone to threaten a state senator and his family.

This month's indictment doesn't detail how much money guards at the McConnell Unit Prison allegedly received in exchange for the cell phones.

But in 2009, one top Texas investigator told CNN that a smuggled cell phone could fetch as much as $2,000.

In the McConnell Unit Prison, authorities said Wednesday that rampant corruption had festered since 2005.

Thirteen of the former guards arrested are charged with racketeering, and four face drug charges, Dodge said.

In total, authorities have arrested 29 people in connection with the alleged scheme. Three others are still at large, Dodge said.

Now, authorities said, some of the former correction officers who once guarded the Texas prison are behind bars themselves.

“Everybody in my family has some kind of uterine problem,” King told me. “My mom and three sisters have all had hysterectomies.” So when King started bleeding continuously while serving a one-year sentence at Dawson State Jail for a parole violation, she asked to see a doctor.

“I bled for nine months,” she says. “I’m sorry, I know this is gross, but I’d step in those metal showers and you could hear blood clots fall out as big as my hand.”

King says that at Dawson, prisoners must first fill out a form asking for medical care and wait five to eight days for it to be processed. “Then they schedule you for a doctor if they think you actually need to see a doctor,” she said. Getting an appointment can take another week.

The physicians’ assistants who saw King didn’t think she needed to see a doctor. They also didn’t give her an exam. “They gave me antibiotics,” she says, “They said it was something going around, a venereal disease.” With a week’s worth of antibiotics and a menstrual pad, King was sent her back to her cell.

King’s experience at the troubled Dawson State Jail, a privately run, 2,200-bed lockup for nonviolent offenders, isn’t unusual. Several inmates at the facility have complained of poor conditions and lack of access to medical care that, in a few cases, led to deaths. Dawson has come to exemplify the once unutterable, now bipartisan, cause of closing some Texas prisons.

Yesterday, two advocacy groups, The Sentencing Project and Grassroots Leadership, released a report summarizing the case for closing Dawson—primarily that it could save the state $24 million a year. That’s not counting how much the state could make by selling the property on which Dawson sits, a riverside plot in downtown Dallas that the city has been clamoring to develop for years.

Nearly every stakeholder wants Dawson closed, except, of course, for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which operates the jail; its contract is up for renewal in August. State lawmakers, including Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chair of the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice, want Dawson closed because Texas’ inmate population continues to drop and the state can save money by consolidating prisons. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the union that represents prison guards, wants Dawson closed because chronic understaffing makes the facility an extremely stressful and dangerous workplace. Human-rights groups want Dawson closed because of documented, systemic failures in its health care services and the horrifying deaths of several inmates, allegedly due to medical negligence.

Compared to the seven inmates who have died at Dawson since 2004, Wendy King was lucky.

Back in her cell, she continued to bleed. “I lost so much blood, it’s amazing I could walk,” she says. Finally another inmate told a guard about King’s condition, and the guard escorted her down to the clinic personally. The physician’s assistants still didn’t allow King to see a doctor, nor, she says, did they give her an exam or run any tests. But they did give her two shots of Depo Provera within the space of a few weeks. Depo Provera is a powerful birth control hormone intended to be given only once every three months. The shots slowed King’s bleeding, and she lived with it for the next seven months, until her release in September 2011.

King never saw a doctor at Dawson. Once she was released, she sought help and her condition turned out to be non-lethal: endometriosis and a retroverted uterus. Endometriosis happens when the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, and can cause heavy bleeding and scar tissue, sometimes enough to tilt, or retrovert, the uterus. Though the condition required surgery and rehab, it could have been worse. King’s sister died in October 2011, a month after King was released, of an aggressive uterine cancer.

Unfortunately, King’s is among the least disturbing stories of medical horror at Dawson. In 2012, the Dallas news station CBS 11 ran a four-part exposé highlighting alleged medical negligence at the jail and detailing three cases:

• In 2008, a 30-year-old woman named Ashleigh Parks died of pneumonia six weeks before her release date. Her family says she was denied medication until it was too late, a claim supported by letters from other inmates who knew Parks.

Pamela Weatherby
• In 2010, Pamela Weatherby, 45, died while serving a year for drug possession. The lawsuit filed by Weatherby’s family against CCA details how she was taken off her prescribed insulin injections and given cheaper oral insulin, resulting in diabetic comas. Repeatedly, Weatherby was medically stabilized elsewhere and returned to Dawson, where she would again be denied her insulin injections and suffer another coma. Weatherby arrived at Dawson in May. She was dead by July.

An autopsy revealed that she died from diabetes complications.

CBS 11 obtained internal documents from CCA showing that the chief of security reported that Dawson staff “didn’t follow proper procedures in that they did not call a medical professional” the night of Weatherby’s death and recommended termination of shift supervisors. But a week later, Senior Warden Raymond Byrd determined, “The actions by employees were consistent with TDCJ policy and procedure. No training needs have been identified at this time.”

• Parks and Weatherby aren’t alive to tell their stories, but Autumn Miller is. Miller didn’t know she was a few weeks pregnant when she arrived at Dawson in January 2012 to serve a year for violating her probation. But by May, she knew something was wrong. She’d been missing periods and felt sick. A mother of three, Miller recognized pregnancy. Miller is still at Dawson, but her mother, Jean Burr, told Miller’s story to CBS 11 after seeing its coverage of Weatherby’s death. Burr says that in May, Autumn Miller requested a pap smear and pregnancy test but never got them. Three weeks later, she started bleeding and cramping, feeling pressure and pain. The staff brought her to the medical unit on a stretcher, and Burr says a doctor was on a video screen—Dawson is one of many facilities that use telemedicine to save money—but that an assistant told the doctor he wasn’t needed and turned off the screen. A guard suggested, “You probably need to go poo,” gave Miller a menstrual pad and locked her in a holding cell. “The pressure was so bad that she went to the toilet,” Burr told CBS 11. Then, “the baby came out and went into the toilet and started screaming.” The baby girl, named Gracie, was just 26 weeks along. She died four days later. Miller had a tubal ligation and was allowed to stay in the hospital until Gracie passed away in her arms. Half an hour later, Miller was shipped back to Dawson, where they placed her in solitary confinement for two days, because, they said, she was on “suicide watch.”

• Shebaa Green, 50, suffered from diarrhea and difficulty breathing for three days before she was allowed to go to the medical unit at Dawson last August, according to records obtained by CBS 11. She lay there unexamined for three hours before anyone arrived to look at her. Seven hours later, a doctor called an ambulance as Green struggled for breath. She died the next day of complications due to pneumonia.

CBS 11 reported that 15 women talked to the station about mistreatment they witnessed or experienced at Dawson; two said they had extremely high fevers and were left in segregation for days or weeks without ever seeing a doctor.

Another, Lorraine Brown, said that, like Weatherby, she was diabetic and never received her insulin at set times. She also said she watched a woman have a stroke, become paralyzed, and be left for other inmates to bathe and care for.

Other former inmates echo these stories on Topix.com, in an online forum about Dawson State Jail conditions, though the details of their stories haven’t been confirmed.

But the case against Dawson’s medical care isn’t just anecdotal. A January 2012 audit of Dawson health services by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found multiple systemic failures: noncompliance more than half the time in areas of preventative, gynecological, dental, HIV and elder care. They even failed the basics: conducting inspections, having enough first aid kits, providing medically appropriate diets to sick prisoners, and keeping adequate records.

CCA has issued statements in response to the CBS 11 reports, saying that its “dedicated, professional corrections staff is firmly committed to the health and safety of the inmates entrusted to our care.” They point out that CCA is not the health care provider—the state contracts with the University of Texas Medical Branch for care—but in each case of alleged mistreatment, the problem was not bad treatment but a denial of access to treatment. CCA staff at Dawson, the ones whom Senior Warden Byrd said had no training needs, are the gatekeepers. CCA says it can’t comment on the Weatherby case because of the ongoing lawsuit, and “As for the other allegations, there are no complaints on record from those inmates about their access to quality health care.”

Perhaps the most amazing part is that Dawson’s closure still isn’t a sure thing. Despite financial, practical and moral reasons for closing Dawson, the state may renew CCA’s contract for the facility in August. The simple reason is that CCA, the largest private prison company in the world, is a powerful lobbyist.

Sen. Whitmire has been trying to close Dawson since 2008. In December, Robert Wilonsky of the Dallas Morning News asked Whitmire about the chances of successfully closing Dawson this time.

Whitmire laughed, paused for a long time, and then said, “Better than 50-50.”

Emily DePrang freelanced for The Texas Observer for ten years before joining the staff as a reporter. A former nonfiction editor of the Sonora Review, her work has appeared in Black Book, FHM, and several publications that have since gone out of print. She has a bachelor's in English from the University of Texas at Austin and a master's in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She is happy to be home.

CYPRESS – Unemployment benefits are supposed to be life lines to out-of-work Texans.

But the KHOU 11 News I-Team uncovered millions of dollars in unemployment payments are flowing into jails and prisons across Texas.

All of it comes as the Texas Workforce Commission insists that fighting fraud is one of the agency’s top priorities.

But after we found more than 1,700 cases of inmates collecting unemployment, some want to know if anyone is really watching the system?

Inside her Cypress home, Bonnie Griffin’s former office now resembles a used furniture showroom.

“These are some pieces I put on Craigslist,” Griffin explained.

To her, the chest of drawers and dresser represent more than pieces of a bedroom set.

“I see it as money that will help me pay my bills,” said Griffin.

Two years ago, she lost her job working in the human resources department of a major oil and gas corporation.

Now, Griffin sells her belongings just to pay for the basics.

“It's tough,” she explained.“It's really good to have friends because I can call on them and say what are you having for dinner tonight? That's kind of how it is.”

As she continues her search for a job, Griffin’s weekly $440 unemployment check keeps her afloat.

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Griffin said. “I don’t want to be somebody on the streets.”

Griffin’s case shows the way the state’s unemployment system is supposed to work.

But the 11 News I-Team uncovered another side.

It’s an abuse of the same system that puts unemployment payments in the pockets of criminals while they’re in prison.

In fact, in the last four years, the Texas Workforce Commission identified 1,746 cases of inmates fraudulently collecting benefits.

TWC estimates the total cost of the fraud during that period has been nearly $3.4 million.

It’s something that outrages honest Texans.

“There's no excuse for that,” said Raymond Hall, a retired veteran. “That's money that a man has not worked for.”

Or woman in the case of Tamika Scales.

She was serving time for mail fraud in a prison outside Fort Worth when prosecutors say she collected $5,000 in unemployment.

We showed the figures to Tom “Smitty” Smith with the watchdog group Public Citizen.

“Astounded,” said Smith. “This is an outrage.”

Smith believes common sense dictates that prisoners should be at the top of the list of people to watch for this kind of fraud.

“The people we already know are criminals who will commit fraud, who will lie and cheat and steal and are behind bars, ought to be the place where we are putting our greatest amount of scrutiny,” said Smith.

However, TWC admits that hasn’t happened.

The agency performs monthly comparisons of lists of unemployment recipients to lists of inmates.

But, TWC spokeswoman Lisa Givens says that those checks are limited to inmates serving time in state prisons.

That means if someone was locked up in city or county jails or even federal prison, odds are TWC had no access to that information.

But the 11 News I-Team discovered something else.

Although Tamika Scales pled guilty to theft of government property, her case is the only successful prosecution of an inmate collecting unemployment in the last four years, according to TWC.

Givens says that’s because it costs the state money.

“You are spending resources to prosecute,” explained Givens. “You know, we have to look at how much the amount is and weigh that on what makes sense on the agency to be able to prove.”

“Wouldn’t prosecuting people, even if it is expensive send a message to inmates, this is wrong, and we’re going to prosecute you?” asked the I-Team.

“Yeah, well we certainly want to be able to provide deterrent information,” replied Givens. “We did have a case where we did prosecute.”

“But you had one case out of 1,746 cases,” the I-Team pointed out.

“Right,” said Givens.“Like I said, we have to look at limited resources.”

Limited resources are something Griffin knows all about.

“I only put $350 on it, but it's worth a lot more than that,” she said looking at the furniture she was selling.

She says she’s sickened to see what’s happening to the money she so desperately needs.

“How could you take money away from people who need it?” asked Griffin. “If you need it, collect it. But if you don't need it, it's not yours.”
To combat the problem, TWC recently launched a $450,000 pilot project to better detect fraud. That project includes gaining access to incarceration data from city and county jails, as well as other states’ prison systems.